Welcome to the Journal of Now and Forever. This Journal is a collection of my Star Control and Star Control 2 fiction. Note: Some of this material is, by necessity, extrapolation from the slim information provided by canon sources.

New fiction is posted first at My Livejournal before it appears here. This story is in response to Spamprovs' Challenge #5.

It was a beautiful day for a meeting.

Since they had a whole planet to roam, enough firepower to keep off any big predators, and no great desire to stay indoors any more than they had to, many Androsynth had taken to holding meetings – official, impromptu, what-have-you – outdoors whenever weather permitted. Plus, Dina thought, it was just nice to breathe deeply of fresh air and feel warm sunshine while you discussed the matters on the agenda.

An oddity of the Androsynth society that had sprung up on Eta Vulpeculae 2 was a comparative lack of people demanding to be in charge. The Androsynth were engineered for intelligence, and most of them just wanted to do their jobs and be left alone to do them well. Of course, some leadership was required, if only to say "get these jobs done first," but the overall lack of bureaucracy was refreshing, at least some of the time. The rest of the time, it was frustrating, because it was hard to tell exactly who was in charge of what and where everyone ranked in the society.

By now, Dina knew who the rest of her fellow committee members were. Jack, the short, dark-haired Androsynth, was in charge of habitat engineering; Ruth, the other female in the committee, was in food supply, for example. Dina herself was the sole reproductive researcher here, but after two meetings she had come to realize that she was considered an equal to her fellow committee members. She was proud of that, of course – who wouldn't be?

Today, it wasn't too hot, not too cold: a beautiful early-fall day on Eta Vulpeculae 2. The Committee for Project Phoenix, Gary had dubbed it during the second meeting. Goal: To rise from the ashes of their engineered sterility. Jack had rolled his eyes, but the rest of them were fine with the name – if someone wanted to glorify the committee, fine. Just let them get their work done in peace.

They sat under an evoak tree – the name from "Eta Vulpeculae oak", probably would have given an Earthling nomenclatist conniptions – as they discussed how the plan to kidnap Earthling humans for "research" was going.

"We've got a new redesign of the ships already in prototype," Gary said. It turned out he was high-ranking in spacecraft engineering. "We're calling them the Guardian-class series. They'll have a smaller crew, I'm thinking about a dozen people on board. If we don't need all dozen or so, we can probably take an extra Earthling for every crew member we don't bring on the trip. Of course, there's a limit to this – ideally you have at least four people to run the ship, but if the Earthlings are alive and conscious, someone's got to guard them."

"Still think you should freeze them," Jack muttered. Rare among the Androsynth, he wore small reading glasses. The truth had eventually come out: his series, dubbed Necro-99, had been deliberately engineered with myopia, in an early attempt to keep that clone series under control. As bad eyesight was so rare among Androsynth, no one had put much effort into correcting it, and after a few self-deprecating jokes about reading Braille and needing a cane, Jack had put the issue aside, and so had everyone else.

Dina wondered how bad some of the other early Androsynth series might have had it. She herself was a late model series, JHJG-768, without any extreme physical problems. A few small flaws, perhaps, but nothing that couldn't be hidden or worked around.

"Even if we freeze them, that'll take up space," Gary continued. The breeze ruffled his salt-and-pepper hair. "At any rate, depending on how many we grab, we should have plenty of room."

"When will the ships be ready?" Dina asked. "The new Guardians?"

"About three weeks. We'd been planning new ships anyway, so it didn't take much to adapt these. If we're lucky, the Earthlings haven't had time to develop anything even close."

"That's cold comfort," Ruth said. Today she wore a long braid, but wisps of raven hair still escaped to frame her face. "We don't know what the Earthlings have been up to. They may have discovered hyperspace by now."

"Let's say they haven't," Tomo said. He lay on his back, eyes closed, in the sunlight. "We send one ship to see what the Earthlings are doing, space-wise. How exactly are the Guardian crew going to capture some Earthlings?"

Gary spread his hands, the truncated fingernails visible. "We won't know. We may even have to do a reconnaissance mission first. There's too much we don't know about the Sol system and what the Earthlings have done since we left. We've improved the hyperdrive's efficiency, at least, so the round trip shouldn't be as long as it would have been from, say, two years ago."

"If the Earthlings do have ships of their own, we should probably avoid them," Kurt broke in. "Ideally, a small, out of the way outpost, such as an asteroid, would be the best target. Get in, depredate – "

"What?" Jack interrupted.

"Loot," Dina translated. Jack nodded.

"- and destroy the place on the way out," Kurt finished, "so they don't get any funny ideas about Androsynth involvement. As long as they think we're far away and ignoring them, they'll probably just continue to ignore us."

Tomo nodded, eyes still shut. "We'll bring this up again when the Guardians are ready, then. What's next?"

"I think Kurt had something else," Ruth said. Each meeting, someone else was temporary secretary of the committee; it made sure the onerous duty was spread out. So far Dina had avoided the short straw.

Kurt stretched and sat up. "I had some questions for Dina," he said, finger-combing his hair. "Let's presume we get some fairly-intact humans suitable for parts. Can we estimate how long until reproduction is feasible?"

Dina shook her head. "I couldn't say until we get started."

Kurt gave a shrug. "Fair enough. Let's presume, again, that the parts are acceptable and that you and your assistants work your lab magic to fix our problem. How do we choose who gets to reproduce?"

Dina had dreaded this question, even as she knew it was valid. "At that point, I suppose we'll have to test all extant Androsynth to see who gets ruled out, first."

Gary's face darkened. Dina knew why: It was very likely the spacers, the spacecraft pilots and crew, were experiencing accelerated genetic damage: mutations. Probably from the higher exposure to radiation that they endured from working in space so often. The spacers might be excluded as a group.

"There's another problem," Ruth said. She sat cross-legged, leaning against the evoak's trunk. "Actually, a few problems. Let's assume we rule out everyone who has bad genes. Someone will complain – it's inevitable – but it can't be helped. There's no clause anywhere in our unwritten laws that says you have a right to reproduce."

Heads nodded all around. Ruth continued: "Do you rule out all but, say, one of each clone series? Let's say a particular series – I don’t know, the JOR-15s – have one member here on EV2. Do they have priority over the DORN-3s who may have a hundred clones here?"

"I hope you're writing this down," Jack commented. Ruth grimaced, then started transcribing her own words.

"If I can add to this," Tomo said, opening his eyes at last, "I think we should consider the male to female ratio. It's..." he searched the clouds for the right phrase. "Seriously out of whack, I think it goes," he decided. "I think – though it probably won't be universally liked – that we need every single female to reproduce, regardless of clone series. We just don't have enough to allow the luxury of not bearing children."

Dina had known in the back of her mind that this would probably happen to her. She still didn't like how Tomo put it. She and Ruth and all other females would be breeding stock, in a sense. Yes, it would help the race as a whole, but given that Androsynth didn't age, or at least nowhere near as quickly as Earthlings, it meant –

"Potentially lifelong, continuous pregnancy and child-rearing," she murmured. Then, in a louder voice, "Tomo? There is something else to consider here. Every female who undertakes pregnancy and child care is a worker who is removed from production. And I believe there would be a top limit as to how many offspring each female can realistically handle."

"What are the numbers?" Tomo asked. He looked genuinely curious.

"Well," Dina started, tucking her hair behind her ears, "If memory serves me right..." she tapped into her microcomputer's database. "The recommended time between children, according to Earth science, was three years. This allows enough time for the woman's body to recover, and to raise the child to reasonable self-sufficiency: they can walk, talk, feed themselves, are toilet trained, and so on, in time for the process to start all over again."

Ruth's expression indicated she was not keen on the "start all over again" part. Dina continued: "Now, after three years, of course, the child is not on its own or abandoned – the mother still has to care for it until adulthood. Again, ideally the child's father is around in a monogamous or other culturally accepted-format relationship, to help the mother and provide for the child, morally, personally and physically."

"Earthlings crank out kids all the time," Jack said. "Lots of 'em didn't bother waiting three years."

"I said that was the ideal, not the reality. But it does mean that unless other people are tapped to help provide child care, one female Androsynth cannot do it alone. She will need support from the entire society. And that brings up a further matter for discussion: Fathers."

"This is turning into a tarbaby," Kurt muttered. "Every way we turn, there's another sticking point."

Dina ignored him. "We'll have to figure out how to arrange the entire thing: how do these families come together? Do we follow one of the Earthling models? I have to say, they've done all right for themselves for thousands of years, with arranged marriages, or developing relationships and then marriage, or any number of variations."

"They've done all right, but they're also the ways of our ancestors. They're almost antiquarian," Kurt said, with sudden antipathy. "What's wrong with just making more clones? We'll grow them up as we were grown up. It served us just fine. Look what we've accomplished!"

"We can't afford that," Jack said, taking off his glasses and polishing bits of dust off them. "First, we don't have the cloning facilities here. We'd have to build them, and those were one of the most closely guarded secrets of the BioTeknik. Second, anything that could affect one series adversely will affect all members of that series adversely. The only way to improve the species is by sexual reproduction, allowing good mutations to come to the fore."

Kurt looked unconvinced. Perhaps it was just as well that Ruth mused at that point, "We could hope that some Androsynth are homosexual."

"What?" "Are you insane?" "Do you think it's likely?"

"It's certainly possible," Dina admitted. "We know next to nothing about the original clone stocks."

"Oooh!" Kurt suddenly simpered. "Oh, please clone me! I don't think I could stand the touch of a woman!" He waved his hands in the traditional effeminate stereotype, then dropped the act, fuming. "God! Just because we were Androsynth and sterile didn't mean we were gay!"

Gary broke the moment of awkward silence that followed. "I take it that means that attempting hermaphroditism is off-limits?"

"Certain taboos are inviolable. That's one of them," Gary warned.

"It's not something I really want to get into, either," Dina said. "Mammals aren't built for it, and it would take a lot more engineering than simply reversing sterility." To be honest, hermaproditism made her queasy, and not just for the reasons she mentioned.

"All right then," Tomo said, in a tone that said the topic was ended and there would be no arguing about it. "Now then. Dina, you mentioned arranged marriages and so on. Even if you and your team manage to make Androsynth fertile, doesn't that mean we'd have sex hormones running rampant through our systems?"

Ruth sighed. "It'd gouge the heart out of our productivity. You have to admit, it's helped us immensely to be able to concentrate on our work, instead of worrying about interactions with the opposite sex."

Dina had to agree. They all did. It was how the towns and facilities of Eta Vulpeculae 2 had been created: through lots of hard work without too many distractions of a personal nature. She tried to picture herself gliding across the lab floor in a diaphanous gown to attract one of her male co-workers. The image refused to manifest itself, which was probably for the best, she decided.

Evidently the rest of the group was trying to picture something similar, judging by the frowns and looks of concentration. Ruth suddenly burst out laughing hysterically.

"What is it?" Tomo asked.

Ruth couldn't answer right away, she was laughing so hard. When she finally recovered, wiping the tears away from her face, she said, "I think I hurt a lung there. I was just trying to picture an Androsynth on a bearskin rug in front of the hearth – you know, one of the classic erotic images of Earthlings – it just didn't work. Too funny." She laughed a bit more, but the fit had passed.

"Maybe cloning would be the way to go," Tomo mused. "Except that progress would be slower than molasses in January, considering we have no tanks or formulae."

"So it's back to kidnapping Earthlings," Gary said. "Let's not forget something here: All this talk is fine, but until we actually get some humans to work on, it doesn't matter how much we blue-sky our problems. It doesn't matter what we speculate. None of it will matter until we capture some Earthlings, both male and female, and bring them back here, alive and reasonably well. It doesn't matter if they lose a leg or an arm, does it?" he turned to Dina.

"Er, no, I suppose not," she agreed. "Except that it would stress them physically and mentally. I'm not sure off the top of my head if it would make a difference to their DNA."

"Eh." Gary waved it off. "Frankly, I don’t think I care that much about how much stress they're under. Just give me a few months – enough time to get the new Guardians built, crewed and tested. Then we'll take a little trip to Sol system and see what the Earthlings have been up to while we've been gone. By the time we report back – unless we get very lucky and hit upon someone out where they won't be missed – it'll be even later, and we'll have to adjust plans if need be. All in all, I think we've got plenty of time to worry about all these other problems after we get some warm bodies through space. Am I right?"

"No, you're right," Dina sighed. "And even after we get them – whenever that might be – it will still take time for us to study their DNA and determine where the differences are regarding reproductive sections. We can't copy wholesale or we could destroy the integrity of our DNA that we want to keep, like long life."

A low buzz came from a hover shuttle flying some distance away.

"Then it's settled," Tomo said. "We've got plenty to think about, but also plenty of time to come up with suggestions and possible solutions. There's no need to rush into anything yet. I'm sure Gary and his new Guardians will give us what we need to get started, and Dina and her lab techs can finish the job."

The buzz proceeded to crescendo as the shuttle approached their hill, then banked away. There was a small pond nearby, with the greenish scum that signified stagnant water. The shuttle dumped a barrel of white powder on the scum; even from the hill they could hear it sizzle.

"Probably algaecide," Jack guessed. "There's less water around here than there'd be on Earth. Probably someone in Ag trying to keep it clean for livestock purposes."

"I hate to break up the meeting, but I've got work to catch up on," Kurt said. "Shall we table matters until next time?"

They agreed as one. They'd all come out in one shuttle, the little Alpenstock-class ten-seater, so there was no real incentive to staying behind. As they began packing up their equipment, Jack stayed near Dina for a moment.

"Dina," he said in a quiet voice, while the rest began boarding the shuttle, "Don't get cocksure about this. I can't explain it," he said, raising a hand against her unspoken questions. "I just... something's going to go wrong. And even if it goes right..." He sighed, and paused while they shouldered their packs. "I suspect we'll get through this, the reproductive problem, but it'll be a pyrrhic victory. To save our race, we may have to destroy our society."

"I think you're being overly negative," Dina retorted, but she had already wondered the same thing.

Comments? Email me: laridian at aol dot com